So back in the day I was a big Firefly fan. So I was thrilled to find out that BenBella Books, home of the SmartPop series, had put out a book devoted to our favorite space opera cum post-Civil War Western, featuring moral ambiguity, kickass heroines, strangely devoted siblings, and spaceships!
My opinion is skip the book and just watch your DVDs instead. There's 2 good pieces of commentary--Tanya Huff does an excellent examination of Zoe's character and Michelle Sagara West's analysis of the Zoe/Wash marriage is spot on. Roxanne Longstreet Conrad offers an excellent parody and discussion of Star Trek Enterprise and Firefly that nicely dovetails what the new face of science fiction might be. Lawrence Wat-Evans draws connections between the Reavers and the legend of Sawney Beane that is fascinating. But the rest of the essays are mostly either ridiculous or miss the mark. Part of the problem is that this collection was published in between the series and the release of the movie, so it suffers from a combination of not enough material to really get a lot of good, outside and different perspective on it. Oh, and having writers from the Whedon Cabal? Not helping matters any.
Oh and Serenity the movie? Sucked in my opinion. Too little Western, hated the Simon and River's escape retcon, too much sterile blue and gray (what, that's my Civil War shout-out?) in the color choices, and they turned poor Kaylee into a slut. I got in a 20 minute conversation with my comics guy last week on whether Joss Whedon can be trusted not to destroy his own work. I'm still not sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment